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The twenty five years that
have since passed - including his transition to sculpture and replicated
cut-outs and the surrender of literary expressiveness - have not
succeeded in obscuring his outstanding characteristics: that same
innocent, generous, warm, placated gaze, non-critical and often
amused. A gaze which has never stopped wondering at the basic elements
of the world, and despite its defilement and "madness" continues
to proffer everyone scenery, climate, beach, pool, light, color
and the conditions for developing a simple, up beat leisurely culture,
such as swimming, diving, rowing, ball games on the beach, folk-dancing,
interior decorating, a curtain blowing in a window, flowers on a
table near a letter and a cat, a red-hot slice of watermelon or
an enticing juicy bowl of fruit.
This is David Gerstein's proposal for the establishment of our "Israeliness"
inventory: A highly processed, softened, escapist "Israeliness",
free of veiled exoticism in the style of Gutman or Rubin. Because,
for example, when Gerstein sees a donkey on the Ma'ale Edumim road,
he first remembers Gutman's donkey, a memory which duplicates the
artist's view of the donkey in a kind of cinematic "double-take":
as one who is filled with wonder, remembers the painterly precedents
of that donkey, is re-filled wonder and decides that he has other
reasons to like the donkey and want to paint it, different motives
than those which directed Gutman or Rubin. The donkey is part of
the place, a burden carrying beast which could be found on the construction
sites of our childhood in the fifties, the vegetable wagon that
wandered around the neighborhoods. For those like Gerstein who were
born here, there is nothing exotic about the donkey as there was
for the first Land of Israel painters who came from Europe and veiled
almost everything they found in oriental charm; rather it is a creature
that symbolized and continues to symbolize all those characteristics
which make people fond of it. The donkey is part of the place's
collective memory. What could be more natural than to add it to
the local reservoir of images? Part of the "Israeli" culture.
Until the late eighties - when the large body of his works called
"cut-outs" appeared, along with the process of reproducing them
in series of up to 295 signed and numbered copies, hand-painted
in industrial paints with some variational freedom - Gerstein went
through different expressive phases, yet in all of them he brought
together the biographical with the local. Over the years his image
reservoir grew to include local trees and birds, and his painting
technique improved until it reached the formulation of handwriting,
line and coloring which are uniquely his own. His images were treated
again and again, his funny figures internalized their slight stammer,
their innocent absurdity and their kindness, until they became more
and more graphic, automatic, spontaneous, immediate, schematic,
direct, with no double-lining. Merely a smiling gaze. Before the
metal cut-outs with their industrial-like process of production,
Gerstein created works in painted wood-cuts. He painted the first
of these objects in the exact same manner as his canvases - with
conventional oil paints. However, the transition to another medium
and material called for relevant paints and painting techniques:
super-lacquer, stencils, tapes, air brushes, etc. He tried to liberate
the "statues" cut in wood from the flatness of the plywood. In order
to achieve an expressive, tangible effect he covered the image's
surface with a mixture of glue, sand and paint, and added acrylic
paint on top of the resulting rough texture. However, it seems that
even this did not satisfy him. His quest for a suitable personal
language led him to metal, forcing him to give up acrylic paint
and adopt industrial paint, since acrylic does not take to metal.
The improved technique gave rise to strong characteristic graphic
bravado, with stylistic gestures of strong figuration, classical
elements of drawing and traditional painting compositions. With
these came a great release of color and a switch to shiny, sensual
colors that celebrate life and its fullness, with their television-like
flickering and their lack of guilt and conflict.
Gerstein's rich painting style; the secular, flat, mundane images,
simple and glowing in their colors; his relating to a society accustomed
to seeing reality through the television frame and which has forgotten
the simple pleasures of sand and sea and riding a bicycle with one's
hair blowing in the wind - all these encourage us to ascribe his
cut-outs to a late Israeli-style pseudo Pop Art genre, designation
by genre and, not a fundamental-ideology. It should be noted that
in Israel, Pop Art, unlike other international styles such as American
Abstract, Minimalism, Conceptualism and even Post Modernism, did
not catch on.
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